In 1972 the Southern Illinois University Press republished Edith
Summers Kelley’s 1923 novel Weeds, beginning what
became the Lost American Fiction Series.1 Matthew
J. Bruccoli, the series editor, aimed to republish obscure and
disappearing works of fiction felt to deserve new audiences. E. P.
O’Donnell’s novel The Great Big Doorstep (1941)
was chosen in 1979 to be republished in the series with an
afterword and end note about the author by Eudora Welty. Welty’s
essay and note are reprinted here following this brief
introduction.

O’Donnell, born Edwin Phillip and known to friends as Pat, grew
up near the wharves in an area of New Orleans known as the Irish
Channel. Though he left school by the seventh grade, O’Donnell
developed a pattern of working two jobs at a time (Welty,
Afterword 19–20). While at the Ford assembly plant, he rose
from working on the assembly line to being chief of publicity. It
was here that, after giving a tour of the plant in the 1920s to
Sherwood Anderson that the author encouraged O’Donnell to use his
gift for words to write (Flora and Vogel 303). O’Donnell
published his first short story, “Transfusion,” in the 1929 first
issue of Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, a little
magazine with which Welty was familiar created by Brookhaven,
Mississippi, native Charles Henri Ford. The magazine also attracted
work from Erskine Caldwell, another southern writer (Weddle
23). From this beginning, O’Donnell continued to gain
recognition for his style and talent.

O’Donnell’s short story “Jesus Knew,” published by
Harper’s in 1935, won him third prize in the O. Henry
Memorial Awards and helped him earn the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship
in 1936, the first year the award was offered, although Jon Edgar
Webb’s entry had the backing of Sherwood Anderson (Flora and
Vogel 303, Brooks 34, Weddle 23). The title of
O’Donnell’s sample for the fellowship application, “Spume on the
Pollen,” referenced a scene for the projected novel in which a
Cajun grows Easter lilies on someone else’s property. Although this
scene was later included in The Great Big Doorstep,
O’Donnell used the alternate title suggested by editors Paul Brooks
and Ferris Greenlet to replace “Spume on the Pollen.” While
flipping through Barlett’s Familiar Quotations, Brooks
and Greenlet had come upon the phrase “margents green” from John
Milton’s Comus.2 The phrase,
modified to “Green Margins,” became the setting for both of
O’Donnell’s novels (Brooks 34–35). Described by Welty as a
narrow peninsula on the fringe of Louisiana, the area and lives of
the people in it are just that: on the margin (Afterword
13). The novel itself, however, gained notice from O’Donnell’s
contemporaries.

When The Great Big Doorstep appeared in October of
1941, its publication caused a stir with two reviews in the
New York Times within a month of its release. Ralph
Thompson remarked that O’Donnell is “half as fancy a writer … and
about twice as diverting” in his second novel (21). Herschell
Brickell noted that despite the recent familiarity of plots
involving underprivileged families, “O’Donnell’s setting and
characters have refreshing novelty, and the plot … is sufficiently
strong to carry the story without creaking” (22). Brickell
concluded that O’Donnell had easily and successfully overcome “the
severe handicap of the second novel” and expected much from
O’Donnell in the future (22). The next month Joseph Loewinsohn
reviewed the novel in the Atlanta Constitution,
insisting that readers would like the characters (4). The following
year Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who later gained renown
in adapting The Diary of Anne Frank for the screen,
adapted O’Donnell’s novel for Broadway (“Frances Goodrich”).
Despite its short three-week run from November 26 through December
19, 1942, the play continues to be produced occasionally by local
theaters around the country (“The Great Big Doorstep”). The
Great Big Doorstep is different from previous southern
novels, felt reviewers, in the way in which it combines the themes
of poverty, comedy, and the bayou.

O’Donnell’s work is still compared most frequently to that by
Erskine Caldwell. Robert...

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